Clifford Simak by The Trouble & Tycho

Author:The Trouble & Tycho [Trouble, The & Tycho]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-08-24T20:01:27+00:00

You stand up on the rim and look down and there is Tycho, spread out like a map before you, wild and savage, raw and cold and hard, like the entryway to hell. The floor is pitted with little craters that, in some places, are so close together they overlap. There are rugged upheavals, and the soft, dreamlike plains that shimmer with the dancing dust, and the great jagged central mountain throwing a lop-sided shadow that is black as ink.

You look down and see the way that you must go to reach the crater floor and you would swear it was impossible except for the fact you know it can be done, since it has been done before. You see the tracks of the vehicles that have preceded you, cutting across the tiny talus slopes. The tracks are the same as when they were made twenty years ago, except for the tiny pockmarks the meteorites have made, with here and there a broom-like smoothing-out job done by the dancing dust motes, hopping about like jumping beans under the excitation of the solar wind.

And where these other rigs have gone you can be fairly sure that you can go as well, for the trail will be the same. Twenty years is no more than a second on the Moon, for there is no wind and weather and the erosion is minute—the erosion of the meteorites, of the solar wind, of the tiny hammerings of the heat and cold that may sliver a flake of debris from a rock once every hundred years.

There were three of us, I thought, who were going down there and each for a different reason, although Amelia and I, perhaps, had something in common.

Brill was going because he had the wild idea that down there in the crater he would find the answer to the lichens and the hound dogs—the only native life so far found upon the Moon. And perhaps his idea was not entirely wild, for it was only in the Tycho region that one found the lichens and the hounds. It was entirely possible their origin was in Tycho and that those found outside the crater simply had slopped over.

Amelia was going down because she thought there was treasure to be found there—but even more than that she was an extension of a brother who could not carry on his quest, a brother for whom she needed money so he could go back to Earth for treatment of radiation sickness.

And I? I sought the treasure too. But something more than treasure, although I could not at the moment put my finger on the nature of it.

And in going, all three of us were in defiance of the law.

Just a few minutes ago I had made my radio report back to Coonskin Central and now we had twenty hours before they could expect us to report again. And in those twenty hours, I wondered what would happen to us.

I craned my head around and saw Amelia's rig behind us.

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